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FORMER
Siemens AG partner BenQ Corp. has quit the mobile and
notebook market in the Philippines to focus on selling
projectors and monitors.
The
Taiwanese company’s is trying to revive its nearly
shuttered business here and is maintaining partnership
with two Filipino distributors.
“After a
year, we decided we would not continue our mobile-phone
business to the Philippines anymore; we terminated that
for a reason,” new BenQ country manager Steve Lin said.
Lin is
also the business line director for strategic market in
the Asia-Pacific region.
Lin said
that after BenQ spent $700 million for a year on its
joint venture with Siemens, its executives, mostly from
Acer Inc., decided to split the company’s manufacturing
division from the sales and marketing segment.
Beginning September this year, the manufacturing segment
was folded under Qisda Corp. as the original equipment
manufacturer and original design manufacturer not only
for the BenQ brand but also for other electronics and
computer firms like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, according
to Lin.
“Unfortunately, the marriage [with Siemens] ended in a
not very successful result,” Lin said on why it dropped
selling the BenQ-Siemens mobile phones, especially in
the Philippines.
He said
there are only a few markets—Taiwan, Turkey, Vietnam and
India—where the company continues to sell handsets.
“Some countries we see our mobile phones to continue;
other countries we close.”
Likewise, Lin said BenQ also stopped selling laptop
computers in the Philippines. “The sales quantity of our
notebooks was not big enough. The economy of scale for
BenQ laptops is not strong enough.”
Still,
Lin said the company would still be introducing these
products as a secondary priority as “our top priority is
the projector and LCD [liquid-crystal display] monitor.”
“We’re
still waiting for the right time to relaunch our mobile
and notebook [products] in the
Philippines,”
Lin told reporters over the weekend.
Wesley
C. Ngo, general manager of Astech Pengson Distributors
Inc., said they are placing two of ten models of BenQ
projectors in the Philippines.
Ngo told
BusinessMirror “there is still a lot of elbow room for
the projector market as the country’s economic growth
hooks along companies and the education sector.” The
former are the traditional markets for LCD projectors.
Ngo said
that aside from business- process outsourcing companies
that rely on projectors for training, they are eyeing
religious groups as a market for BenQ projectors that
feature a split-screen technology.
“For
advertising companies, too, this technology feature is
helpful because they can run a video ad on the right
screen while displaying the ad rates or figures on the
left side of the screen, without having to buy or
install a separate projector,” Ngo explained.
Ruther
Ng of Bridge Distributors Inc. said this is also the
market positioning for the company’s LCD monitors.
“We’re
going to do things step by step,” Lin said.
Established in 1984 as Acer Peripherals Inc., the BenQ
Group is currently made up of a dozen companies that
posted revenues of more than $16.5 billion last year.
In
April, the company said that “after the discontinuation
of funding for the German mobile-phone subsidiary,
BenQ’s branded business structure has become less
complicated and the scale of branded business has become
relatively small compared to our integrated
manufacturing service business.” |
